


Looking Behind Him

by matrixrefugee



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Torchwood
Genre: M/M, Post-Children of Earth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-21
Updated: 2019-03-21
Packaged: 2019-11-06 22:44:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17948555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/matrixrefugee/pseuds/matrixrefugee
Summary: Even with a new lover in a different time and place, Jack still catches himself looking backward to other times and places...





	Looking Behind Him

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [](https://fic-promptly.dreamwidth.org/profile)[fic_promptly](https://fic-promptly.dreamwidth.org/)'s [Doctor Who, Jack Harkness, pondering on how his life would've ended had he not met the Doctor and Rose.](http://fic-promptly.dreamwidth.org/140260.html?thread=6514148&format=light#cmt6514148) Set after Children of Earth, during Jack's thousand years of wandering.

Because he needed less sleep than most people, this meant that Jack often lay awake beside his loved one or his companion for the night, sometimes slipping out to find other diversions, to keep him occupied while his bedmate slept.

One of those nights, a cool night in a floating city on a planet in what Earth people called the Pegasus Galaxy (which many of the sentient inhabitants on the populated planets would call "the Milky Way", in their local dialect), he slipped out onto the balcony of the room he shared with a scientist who reminded him a bit of Owen. He leaned against the railing, gazing up at the stars and the two moons overhead. The constellations looked different from those of Earth or the ones he had looked up at when he was a kid growing up on the Boeshane Peninsula, on a rock in the far-off Isop Galaxy, but the air reminded him of a cool night during the London Blitz, when he was younger and much more footloose and fancy-free. That night he had planned to palm off some space junk to some roving Time Agents, but he had taken a pause to rescue a blonde in a Union Jack tee shirt, who had gotten herself snagged on the tether rope of an errant barrage balloon.

And how things had changed after that. He thought, with a sad smile, of the way his life had turned upside down after that, how a madman in a box had spirited him away from a certain death, had put an end to a con gone wrong, which had inadvertently set off a chain of events that would have destroyed the human race. He might have gotten free, if he had figured out a way off his doomed ship, but his life would have gone differently. He might have gone on his way back to the 51st century and gone on his merry way, running cons, making heaps of money, losing heaps of money at the space casinos, chasing or being chased off by potential or former lovers (some whom he hadn't met before), till someone got the better of him and put an end to his wanderings and his philanderings.

But all that had changed: his life probably would have ended after a few more years or a few decades, and hopefully he would still have made a decent corpse. Maybe had a funeral that people would talk about for ages, especially if River did him a good turn for a change and claimed his body. Hopefully his demise would have gone down on a planet that would let her plant him in its soil, or where they would allow his remains to be cremated, and there were a few worlds that had banned him from burial in their soil or being released into the space above their atmosphere.

Whatever it was, he had hoped it would be a good death, something memorable. Knowing his old self, it would have been something daft: falling off a balcony while escaping the irate spouse of his current conquest, or falling on the wrong side with some interplanetary crime lord.

Instead, he had yet to see a final end to his life, though he had already been defenestrated by several irate spouses and once literally had had his handsome ass handed to him by a crime lord who fancied creative surgery as a fitting punishment for anyone who cut in on his business. He had celebrated his three thousandth birthday not long before he had met his current flame, and while he still had his health and vigor and drive, he could see entropy starting to have its way with his flesh: a few more grey hairs if he knew where to look for them, the smirk lines about his mouth and eyes growing more pronounced. It seemed as though it took about three thousand years for him to age ten years, give or take a few centuries and how he spent them, the kind of shocks that he took and the kind of things he got into. He would probably outlast several civilizations before he started to slow up and feel his age. He might just get the chance to die in bed of old age, something that rarely happened to a Time Agent or to a member of Torchwood.

Soft footsteps padded across the tiles of the balcony floor and he looked up. His companion of the night approached, a blanket in hand.

"Jack, are you all right?" his bedmate asked. "Thought you'd given me the slip and took the covers to let yourself off the balcony."

Jack turned away from the parapet of the balcony. "Couldn't sleep, so I stepped out here to get a breath of fresh air and a look at the stars," he replied. "I'm hard to get rid of." Then with a glance at the water below them, he added, "Be pretty hard to escape with the water all around us."

"Figured you'd swim out as far as you could," his bedmate said, draping the blanket over Jack's shoulders. "Come on, take this: won't have you catching cold and sneezing around me."

"Nah, colds don't care much for me," Jack said, taking the blanket and drawing his companion closer, draping a corner around the other's shoulders as well as his own.

"Come on, blankets are better when you're laying down under them," his companion said, turing and guiding him back into their chamber, one arm about Jack's waist. Jack went willingly, gratefully. Best not to dwell on the past or on what could have been: better to turn his attention to the company of his present lover, the warmth of their bed on this cold night and the solace they would find in each other's company and in their coupling...


End file.
